Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?

[SeoSheikh]

I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken.

Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have?

Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)?

Many thanks for any help with this matter.

Alex

[ThompsonPaul]

Just to add a couple quick points to the good answers above:

It's not possible to use the underscore "_" in domain names - not a legal character.

As far as using the .co because the .com and .co.uk are already in use - bad idea for another reason. The reality is most people are still not familiar the.co TLD (probably a bit more so in UK where they're already used to hearing .co.uk)

This means a huge number of your potential customers will accidentally type in (when going direct in the browser's URL bar and when linking from their own sites) the more common TLD, resulting in your hard promotional work sending your business to your competitors.

Not to mention the massive headaches when email addresses are accidentally written with the wrong domain ending.

The .co is an interesting addition, but it's still way too far out of the mainstream to risk as your primary domain at this stage, IMO.

Paul

[MoosaHemani]

nops for pages within the domain you should use '-' to separate it instead of '_'.

The reason why you should not do this in the main domain is because it looks spammy to many people as this is the format that most spammers use when buying keyword rich domain names...

[SeoSheikh]

"For separating keywords in the domain i would say do not use it and if it is necessary then use ‘-’ instead of ‘_’."

Should this also apply to pages within a domain?

[MoosaHemani]

Let’s talk completely about branding, I would never recommend you to go for .co domain when .com and co.uk is already taken by other companies...

It’s always an advantage to me to add keyword in the domain name but don’t push it too much if you are not getting it focus more on branding and choose a domain name that is easy to remember.

For separating keywords in the domain i would say do not use it and if it is necessary then use ‘-’ instead of ‘_’.

Hope this help!

[Adam.Whittles]

You should read this really interesting post about EMDs by Dr. Pete:

Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline?

In your case I would just stick to a .com domain with your business name rather than a keyword rich domain. Also if you are competing in the SEO industry and you do not already rank well for your key terms, then you will find it hard to rank regardless. SEO terms are highly competitive and there are several sites offering this service that will have invested heavily in their own SEO, making it very difficult to compete.

In terms of your other question, it is generally best practice to separate words in a URL with a hyphen (-) rather than underscore (_).

Hope this helps,

Adam.